Gartner BI Summit 2009 Day 2

Since I am attending the Performance Management Track, it has a decidedly PM feel to the conference. I can't judge the total audience except from the perspective of the Keynote attendance. The group is shy. During the "Comparing the Megavendors" session Bill Gassman was trying to solicit feedback from the audience (a packed house) and the attendees were reluctant to share their experiences and their opinions. It might have made for more lively discussions. I think it is important to sound out ideas and get others' opinions and perspectives to take advantage of avenues to innovation.

At the last count there were 730+ attendees to the Gartner BI Conference. Of those more than 30% were government and public sector. Another 20+% were vendors. That would seem inline with the expectations for curtailed travel budgets. Vendors are hoping that maybe somebody may still have a budget. The government gets a better rate than the commercial attendees and their fiscal year started before the severe downturn. As to why there is 18% from financial services? It isn't the banks but the insurance companies. No one seems to be buying, though. A less-than-scientific survey of the attendees resulted in a great number of people who are trying to figure out if their deployment is keeping pace with their peers and what they can look forward to for NEXT year - 2010.

I would have liked to go to the different vendor presentations but they were all at the same time limiting my ability. IBM (as commented on by another attendee) showed their traditional positioning presentation that had more rhetoric than content. Oracle seems to fitting into that mold as well from what I could see. Microsoft was confused about their BI offering with the elimination of PerformancePoint and Gartner discounted them in their vendor discussions. I was surprised that Gartner was least supportive (fewer positive ratings) of SAP. They seemed most favorable towards IBM/Cognos and resigned to Oracle as the big dog. In advance of the "Cool Vendors" report they also mentioned Adaptive Planning and Host Analytics, but left off Birst and PivotLink. SaaS, Hosting and OpenSource was mentioned but not with the exuberance I might have expected. The audience seemed to prefer a staid, perfunctory BI and PM implementation as opposed to participating in any kind of dynamic discussion on new technologies and methods. A far more toned down environment even than last year. Is it only the economy or did the venue also change the chemistry of the audience and participants?

Thoughts from the Gartner BI Summit

Only marginally into the BI Summit, but have already had the realization that the Performance Management sessions will be under-attended. Business Intelligence is the domain of IT, but Performance Management is in the hands of the business. Corporate Performance Management, the term which Gartner has chosen to use to refer to those financial applications that are the mainstream of corporate America i.e. planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation and financial reporting, is of little interest to the mainly IT audience here in DC.

An interesting observation. Applications that are tailored to meet the business, but have proscribed functions are within the domain of the business, but the tools used for reporting and dashboarding are in the hands of IT. Business Process Management by definition then, should be in the hands of the business; but it is not.

So the conundrum is in where the attention is focused. If there is extensive on-going development or a relational footprint to the applications or tools it comes under the dominion of IT. If it appears as if the majority of the effort in deployment is in the installation and initial implementation then it is under the business' hands. That doesn't make sense to me.

Truly the answer should be one of a collaborative effort where there is someone technical assigned to meet the needs of the business to help them craft the solution that best meets their strategic needs. Finance IT was born for exactly this reason. This role bridges the gap or divide between the implementation of the application and the eventual use and refinement of the implementation AND the future sculpting of the application to keep it in line with the needs of the business. This is the true role of innovation where a blend of fact and function meet the evolving needs of a dynamic business.

Somehow that's lost here at the Gartner event. But as I said, we are only half a day into it - maybe it will resolve itself to be more on topic and dynamic. I should point out that I think Gartner does see the evolution towards a Performance Management driven business culture, but they also say we are two (yikes!) years away from it.

Insight on the Gartner BI Conference in Chicago

As a long time attendee of the various Gartner events, my favorite has always been the more intimate setting of the BI summit - typically held in Chicago. Boy, was I surprised at the 1200+ attendees of this year's conference and the expectation of bigger growth to fuel a move to Washington, DC in 2009. Last year’s event pales in comparison. BI advocates, typically a cross-over role between Finance and IT, have made a rather dramatic transition into the IT camp for this conference. Many of the sessions were educational and entry-level in scope and oriented to the first time architect and supporter of Business Intelligence environments. The event has clearly moved away from the user of past years.

Also notable was the absence of discussions on the relative cost savings in deploying a BI environment for better business planning and analysis. Other than the one rather cheeky session on how to negotiate a good deal with your BI vendor, I expected to hear more about cost cutting and using BI data to enable efficiencies and identify cost-prohibitive inefficiencies. The market picture has been doom and gloom and the "R" word blatantly used. Instead I heard a great deal about enabling integration and the expansion of analytic applications.

I think this is great news! Clearly the message was to expand the BI footprint and make use of the technology that can drive profitability, not focus on doing more with less. I had conversations with luminaries such as Howard Dresner and Ron Powell, but I also spoke with a number of vendors and implementers such as IBM GBS and Palladium, who had similar messaging of exploiting the existing technologies and refining processes to drive revenue and deliver data on a more continual basis to the employees who can make the right decisions in real-time. This to me is a message of expansion and focus, rather than retrenchment and limitations. I heard a great deal about the continual need for data, an almost real-time need to do continuous planning and report on finer levels of granular information in a more automated fashion. The message was clear. BI is tops in priority and destined to gain more mindshare of senior IT executives as the business expands and focuses their growth. To grow and expand you always need Innovators who can do more with less, but also the visionaries who can see the gold amongst the rock.

The Challenge Remains the Same

In the recently published "Cost Cutting in Data Management and Integration, 2008," Gartner emphasizes the need to reduce costs while continuing to support BI initiatives. Sound familiar? The operating motto for CIOs and IT teams for the past several years: Do more with less.

With recent downturns in the US economy, the business needs for the data coming from BI systems have become critical to companies’ maintaining their competitiveness. When there is less money in play, companies have to understand all facets of their business: where they are making money and where they are leaving opportunities for improvement on the table, to plan continuously, and to have the frameworks in place to change directions quickly in order to stay at the forefront of their markets. There is a pressing need for accurate, reliable data from which they can analyze and gain the insight needed to make the best business decisions possible. This source data comes from the same IT team tasked with reducing their costs.

Balancing the business need for insight into the organization and the IT need to reduce costs is where innovation can occur. Gartner’s report provides a number of recommendations for cutting costs within data management initiatives, ranging from the common-sense Optimize Data Integration Tools Licensing to recommendations that are complex and require creativity within the IT teams to successfully achieve: projects like Perform Operational Database Consolidation and Perform Data Mart Consolidation. Gartner estimates the payback from data mart consolidation as a savings of “approximately 50 percent of the total cost allocated to supporting their disparate data marts if they consolidate those marts into an application-neutral data warehouse.”

Easily said, but how to get from here to there? The solution lies in feeding a central application-neutral data warehouse with business critical data from application-specific data marts. To do this requires using intelligent data movement applications to ensure that this feeding of the warehouse is both seamless (does not interfere with the data mart applications), highly dynamic (so the data is refreshed in near real-time), persisted (ensuring a physical copy of calculated or aggregated data is available in the warehouse), and auditable (for data governance and regulatory compliance).

There are myriad opportunities to reduce costs within the IT department. The challenge is to develop innovative solutions that meet the requirements of data governance, security and accuracy, and still provide business users with the data they need to drive the company forward.